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Chapter 22
The Ordeal of
Reconstruction
Problems of Peace
• Major problems: status of Confederate leaders, destroyed cities,
businesses, and transportation systems, crippled agricultural system,
countless widows and orphans, freed African Americans, and getting
both sides to work together again
• Slaves were freed at different times in different places. Some slaves
were freed when an Union army passed and then were re-enslaved.
• Emancipated slaves took new names, took to the roads to test their
freedom and find family members, legalized their marriages, moved
westward, formed their own churches, and sought improvement and
education.
•Freedmen’s Bureau was created on March 3, 1865. It was to provide
food, clothing, medical care, and education to both freedmen and white
refugees.
• It was supposed to relocate freed blacks onto confiscated Confederate
land but it often worked against African Americans.
• President Johnson disliked the bureau and it ended in 1872.
Charleston, South Carolina, in Ruins, April 1865
Rebel troops evacuating Charleston blew up military supplies to deny them to General
William Tecumseh Sherman’s forces. The explosions ignited fires that all but destroyed
the city.
The Day of Jubilo
This French illustration of “Emancipated Negroes Celebrating the Emancipation
Proclamation” may have been somewhat fanciful, but it captured well the exhilaration
that came with freedom.
Educating Young Freedmen and Freedwomen, 1870s
Freed slaves in the South regarded schooling as the key to improving their children’s
lives and the fulfillment of a long-sought right that had been denied blacks in slavery.
These well-dressed schoolchildren are lined up outside their rural, one-room
schoolhouse alongside their teachers, both black and white.
President Andrew Johnson
• Johnson came from a poor family, apprenticed as a tailor, taught
himself to read, and became active in politics in Tennessee as a
champion to poor whites.
• Refused to secede and was appointed war governor when Union
armies took control of Tennessee.
• He had been chosen to run with Lincoln to attract the War
Democrats and other Southern elements.
• He was intelligent, able, forceful and honest but was faced with
an impossible task.
• He did not understand the North, was not trusted by the South,
and was a Democrat in a Republican White House.
• He was the wrong man, in the wrong place, and the wrong time.
Crushed by the Constitution
President Andrew Johnson revered the U.S. Constitution but eventually felt its
awesome weight in his impeachment trial.
Presidential Reconstruction
• Lincoln’s plan for Reconstruction was the “10 percent” plan. He
would restore the rebellious states to the Union when 10% had
taken a loyalty oath to the Union and promised to abide by
emancipation
• In 1864 Republicans were able to pass the Wade-Davis Bill
which increased the oath to 50% and strengthened emancipation.
• Lincoln refused to sign the bill so it was “pocket-vetoed”.
• Congress was outraged and for the first time the different
opinions regarding Reconstruction between the president and
Congress would be highlighted.
• The Republicans were splitting over those who wanted to restore
the Union as quickly as possible and those more radical
Republicans who wanted to punish the Southern states and
create an entirely new social order.
• Johnson agreed with Lincoln.
Johnson’s Reconstruction Plan
• Issued on May 29, 1865
• Recognized several states who had came in under Lincoln’s
plan.
• His plan: disenfranchised certain leading Confederates, called
for special state conventions which would repeal secession,
repudiate Confederate debt, and ratify the 13th Amendment.
• States that did these things would be quickly restored to the
Union.
• Johnson also handed out pardons in great numbers.
• Republicans became furious when they saw the types of
governments being established by the former rebellious states
and by Johnson’s generosity with pardons.
Sharecroppers Picking Cotton
Although many freed slaves found themselves picking cotton on their former masters’
plantations, they took comfort that they were at least paid wages and could work as a
family unit. In time, however, they became ensnared in the web of debt that their planter
bosses spun to keep a free labor force tightly bound to them.
Black Codes
• One of the first things the new Southern governments did was to
pass Black Codes.
• These laws were designed to regulate the affairs of emancipated
blacks.
• The Black Codes wanted to create a stable labor force from
freed African Americans.
• Blacks that left their “labor contracts” could be caught and forced
to work to pay back their forfeited wages.
• Also tried to restore race relations to their pre-Civil War status.
• Codes forbade blacks from serving on juries, renting or leasing
land, and voting.
• Forced many freed slaves and poor whites into sharecropping, a
system similar to slavery.
• Mississippi had the strictest codes while Georgia’s were the
most lenient.
Congressional Reconstruction
• Republican Congress refused to work with the newly elected
Southern leaders, many of whom were former Confederate
leaders still under investigation for treason.
• Republicans were also nervous because now that freed slaves
were counted as a whole person, the South would gain 12 more
seats in Congress and 12 more electoral votes.
• These Republicans were disturbed when on December 6, 1865
President Johnson claimed the Union restored.
• In the Spring of 1866 Johnson and Congress began to clash.
Congress began to override Johnson’s vetoes and take control of
the government.
• Congress begin to work towards ratifying the 14th Amendment
which extended the earlier Civil Rights Bill.
• Congress said no state would be allowed back into the Union
without first ratifying the amendment. Johnson told the states to
ignore it. All but Tennessee took his advice.
An Inflexible President, 1866
This Republican cartoon shows
Johnson knocking blacks out of the
Freedmen’s Bureau by his veto.
Republicans Campaigning in
Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1868
The soldiers’ caps and regimental flags
demonstrate the continuing federal
military presence in the Reconstruction
South. Radical Republican
congressman Thaddeus Stevens said
that Reconstruction must “revolutionize
Southern institutions, habits, and
manners. . . . The foundation of their
institutions . . . must be broken up and
relaid, or all our blood and treasure
have been spent in vain.”
Military Reconstruction
• 1866 Republicans won more than 2/3 of the seat in Congress.
Enough to override any presidential veto. They now controlled
Reconstruction.
• The Reconstruction Act passed on March 2, 1867 divided the
South into 5 military districts. These districts were controlled by a
Union general and policed by soldiers.
• States would have to ratify the 14th amendment and guarantee
suffrage to all males in the state.
• The 15th amendment was created to force the states to allow
suffrage to black men. Passed in 1869 and ratified in 1870.
• By 1870 all eleven states and written new constitutions and be
restored to the Union.
• By 1877 all federal forces had been withdrawn from the South.
The republican state governments soon shifted to Democratic and
discrimination.
Military Reconstruction, 1867 (five districts and commanding
generals)
For many white Southerners, military Reconstruction amounted to turning the knife in
the wound of defeat. An often-repeated story of later years had a Southerner remark, “I
was sixteen years old before I discovered that damnyankee was two words.”
Freedmen Voting, Richmond, Virginia, 1871
The exercise of democratic rights by former slaves constituted a political and social
revolution in the South and was bitterly resented by whites.
Black Reconstruction
A composite portrait of the first black senators and representatives in the Forty-first and
Forty-second Congresses. Senator Hiram Revels, on the left, was elected in 1870 to
the seat that had been occupied by Jefferson Davis when the South seceded.
The Ku Klux Klan, Tennessee,
1868
This night-riding terrorist has even
masked the identity of his horse.
Impeachment Drama
The impeachment proceedings against President Andrew Johnson, among the most
severe constitutional crises in the Republic’s history, were high political theater, and
tickets were in sharp demand.
Johnson is Impeached
• Congress moved to impeach Johnson when he abruptly fired the
Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton.
• Congress said this violated the Tenure of Office Act which said
the President had to have the permission of the Senate before he
could remove an appointed position.
• Johnson was found “not guilty” by a margin of only 1 vote.
• Johnson had made mistakes but was by no means guilty of “high
crimes and misdemeanors”
• The high point of Johnson’s administration was the purchase of
Alaska from Russia in 1867 for $7.2 million.
• The American people called it “Seward’s Folly” because they did
not understand why Secretary of State William Seward would
want this icy, barren wasteland.
Alaska and the Lower Forty-eight States (a size comparison)
Is This a Republican Form of
Government? by Thomas Nast,
Harper’s Weekly, 1876
The nation’s most prominent political
cartoonist expressed his despair at the
tragic way that Reconstruction had
ended— with few real gains for the
former slaves.